The road to the Minsk summit this past Tuesday began to be paved when German Chancellor Angela Merkel talked to ARD public TV after her brief visit to Kiev on Saturday.
Merkel emphasized, “A solution must be found to the Ukraine crisis that does not hurt Russia.”
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She could not have been more explicit; “We [Germany] want to have good trade relations with Russia as well. We want reasonable relations with Russia. We are depending on one another and there are so many other conflicts in the world where we should work together, so I hope we can make progress”.

The short translation for all this is there won’t be a Nulandistan (after neo-con Victoria ‘F**k the EU’ Nuland), remote-controlled by Washington, and fully financed by the EU. In the real world, what Germany says, the EU follows.